The Genius Within, a review

Well, I was going to go for a little run tonight to try out the new running shoes I got (and boy do they feel nice and springy compared to my old ones) but between lightning, wind gusts, a few drops of rain, and a certain spooky game which I played for a few hours earlier, I decided after about a block that not running would be the better idea. Instead I finished the book The Genius Within by Frank T. Vertosick Jr. It was a decently good book, with a few interesting ideas, but like most of the books I've read which fall into the "written by scientist for the general public" category, this one lacked something in literary quality. I think this is a side effect of writing and reading tons of primary literature. This sort of author seems to rely on very few devices, chief among them is making some claim which is mildly strange, and then going on for pages about how unbelievable we are sure to find it. I sometimes want to scream "SHOW DON'T TELL!!" at them. They also seem to rely on repetition far too much. Read Part 1 of this book, and see if you can keep from cheering when “Poor Tom” (which apparently is his legal name) finally kicks the damn bucket. Anyway, on to the meat and potatoes.
The core thesis of this book is that most, if not all living systems, can be understood more accurately as intelligent networks. Many of the peer to peer file sharing networks like KaZaA are variations on this sort of network theory, and it is really sort of cutting edge stuff. Unfortunately I have only read a few papers on it, so I am no expert by any means. The idea is that one can get intelligent results out of many unintelligent entities by connecting them to one another, and then allowing them to modify their connections, create new connections, and destroy old connections based upon the amount of traffic which flows across these connections, and inputs from the outside world. Vertosick's idea is that we can explain the apparent intelligence of bacteria rapidly evolving to deal with new antibiotics, immune systems memorizing huge lists of antigens, and other highly “intelligent” behavior by applying network principles. He says that this intelligence is an “emergent property” of these large groups of communal entities. For the most part, I find it difficult to disagree with his conclusions because they provide an enlightening way to look at the complexity in biological systems.
In my opinion, his most interesting point is that there are many different manifestations of intelligence and that competition dictates that all surviving organisms must be about equally intelligent in one way or another, or they would have ceased to exist. This is by no means a revolutionary statement. What he is doing here is redefining intelligence to be what a biologist would traditionally call fitness. In the same vein one could argue that all organisms are roughly equal in their fitness level or they would have rapidly ceased to exist already. We can see this clearly in species which are no longer intelligent/fit enough to co-exist with humans and are rapidly going extinct. When it comes to evolutionary theory, it has always been my experience that people don't realize that the fitness of a species is heavily dependent on the environment in which it exists. Putting things in terms of intelligence may make this concept easier to grasp.
This book covers a wide range of topics from the smart, but slow intelligence of the evolutionary process, the genetic learning and problem solving bacterial colonies display, and the speedy intelligence of the vertebrate brain. Vertosick's goal is to explain all of this to someone with little background in biology or computer science, and he doesn't do too terribly at it. He does brush over some of the more complex topics, and spends much to long on some simple ones in my opinion, but this is probably to be expected in a book with an uncertain audience, and such a wide scope. Over all, I would say that this book would be better off if boiled down into three or four 30 page papers, but it isn't too bad.